When I was in elementary school, our musicals praised the glory of the assembly line of the Ford factories. Sitting on our knees in front of our audience, we slapped our hands on the floor, clapped, and pounded our knees to the beat:
Mo (pause)Town (pause) assembly line. Ma-kin' cars and do-in just fine.
Deep down, and secretly, I felt famous. My grandfather had worked at the Ford factory his whole life. Some of my cousins worked for Chrysler. Lee Iacocca felt like a distant third grandfather, somehow, linking the two parts of my lineage.
Yes, there are so many terrible things I would learn about the histories of all of this as I grew older but, as a child, I just saw the paint jobs and interiors that made me drool. I overheard girl teenage cousins talking about their Mustangs. From the backseat of a car, I would lift my nose and peer out the window to stare at the coveted sight of the cars, at night, on Woodward.
How can you deny the beauty of a waxed and detailed car?
There is so much music that ties me here. It's the reason I still stream WJLB to this day. (It's not just the music anymore. It's the commercials, too.)
I was trying to explain Quiet Storm to someone the other day. I pulled this up and had to laugh at the one line of description because it's so true: "If you grew up in Detroit, you know this song":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkJEUbxXw3w .
But it wasn't just that.
It was all of the sound.
It was the sound of chaos and beauty from within the Trumbullplex; it was also the absence of the sound of broken bottle glass crunching beneath your shoes.
[We all knew that shit was worth money; state bottle deposits are for real. I'll always remember when F. moved down to Columbus, Ohio and immediately referred to it as the City of Glass. Coming from Michigan, I, too, was freaked out by the amount of broken glass bottles on the pavement. It was pretty at night under the streetlights, but it forever injected me with a low level of unease.
Such a strange contradiction in that the glass of shattered windshields in Detroit never phased me.
As a kid, I may have bought into the idea of Detroit diamonds.
Somehow, the automotive glass in Detroit was more beautiful in its justification than the pointless destruction infused in those shards that spread across Ohio.]
be well; be loved,
k.
P.S. I just received my introduction into the world of João Pedro Rodrigues, the Portuguese filmmaker who knows how to smear filth in all of its glory. The film O Fantasma served as my introduction. Holy shit. What could be hotter than trash collectors, bathroom sex, latex, landfills, unexplained interactions with silent uniformed men, and almost zero dialogue? After I watched it, I pulled up ratings of it and saw that Rotten Tomatoes gave it 25% and a description of "A trash collector obsesses over a motorcyclist and embarks on a series of homosexual encounters" and had to laugh: The description makes me drool, and the rating just promises that it will be the low-brow, high-art that I crave.
(image credit: A still from O Fantasma)
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